Saturday, October 13, 2007

In this fourth post about OpenID I'll try to give a complete overview of the outstanding issues with OpenID. At the end I'll give a couple of tips for improvements on the outstanding issues. You can find my previous posts here, here and here.

Not average-internet-joe readyAn OpenID is just not in the format an average user currently understands. My parents for example would not be able to "grasp" the idea of a URL being your identification. XRI is a work in progress to let people pick a username that is more or less like regular usernames like '=Paul.Smith'.

Many websites that support OpenID just point to OpenID.net (just renewed by the way, where it's now a lot easier way to find OpenID providers). From there on the user is just "on her own" to figure out what to do. This is not really OpenID's fault, but if the sites that are OpenID-enabled (consumers) are not making it easy for the user to create an account, users will just give up and sign in the "old fashioned" way. These sites should provide direct pointers to solid OpenID providers.

Delegation is quite hard to explain and understand. Even harder to actually use. It is just too hard for the average internet user to set it up. Though delegation is a real important aspect of OpenID, because it allows you to not be dependent on one OpenID provider. If you don't set up delegation for yourself from the start (because that will be your OpenID URL which you can then point (delegate) to any OpenID provider you want), you are out of luck if ever your OpenID provider goes busted.

Different OpenID providers show different, sometimes even confusing, messages when the user has to confirm the site they want to get access to. It gets even more difficult when you can assign multiple personas (see my second post for an explanation of personas). Which one to pick? And why?

SecurityOf course there's the phishing issue (man-in-the-middle) that a malicious consumer site can just redirect the user to a fake OpenID provider. A solution some providers take is forcing the user to login via their regular login page first (and bookmarklet). Though it provides a small barrier, it makes the whole OpenID process just more confusing to the user. And it is not a full solution against phishing; on the phishing site, just tell the user the separate login-page has been fixed (just a bit of social engineering :-). Note that OpenID trusts DNS to direct the given URL to the correct machine; DNS servers are known for being hacked too.

There's also the replay-attack issue, where a sniffer can grab the authenticating response and replay it to the consumer. A partial barrier for that is the use of a nonce (number-used-once, see my third post for some references). Version 2.0 of OpenID should by default contain the nonce-fix for replay-attacks. This does not protect against the case that the man-in-the-middle is the first to use the resonse-URL (more a "pre-play" attack).

If an attacker gains access to a user's OpenID login, he immediately has access to all sites that user can login to; with the same OpenID/password combination.

Since all OpenID providers have the option to stay logged-in to it (thus authenticating without providing a password), CSRF attacks become very easy: no password is required.

How can a consumer use OpenID in an API it provides? The consumer can not ask the user for credentials at each API call. It should ask via the OpenID provider. Work in this area is the oAuth protocol, which I'll cover a bit more in my next post about OpenID.

PrivacySince all authentication (ownership prove of the OpenID) goes via the OpenID provider, the provider can track all the sites their users are accessing.

Improvement tipsBelow I list a couple of ways OpenID can be improved to tackle the above mentioned problems:

Integrate the flow of signing up to an OpenId provider into your consumer/relying party (OpenID enabled) website.

OpenID providers should provide clarity upfront to the users whether their service will always be for free, whether it does support multiple personas etc.

Consumer sites should implement OpenID more transparently. There is no need to make a distinction at registration between OpenID or not. If the user enters no password, it's probably an OpenID so try OpenID authentication, otherwise it's probably a regular signup.

Find a better solution to handle phishing and replay-attacks. SSL client-certificates could be a solution, but then you'd have to bring the public-private keys to every browser and delete them again. The solution could be cryptography using private/public keys (thus not using a password).

OpenID providers should not recycle inactive accounts or at least use a nonce, which the consumers should also check.

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About Me

I'm a professional software designer/architect/developer with over 20 years of experience. For many years I've been a Technical Team Lead for complex ICT projects. My main area of focus is Java application architectures and related challenges (scalability, performance etcetera), but I'm interested in any software application architecture. Currently Android has got a lot of my attention. I will be posting lessons learned, and lessons that I'll be learning during the coming years :-)